An electronic device, such as mobile phone or tablet computer, may be configured to scan for a Wi-Fi-capable device, such as a Wi-Fi access point (AP) or a peer device (e.g., Wi-Fi speakers, Wi-Fi dongles, Wi-Fi printers, etc.) with Wi-Fi capability. Scanning for a Wi-Fi-capable device may be performed by the electronic device in a passive manner. For instance, in the U.S., there are currently 12 and 23 operating channels in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, respectively. For each scan cycle, the device typically scans for all 35 channels and monitors for beacon transmission on each of the channels for up to the duration of the beacon interval, which is typically 100 ms. Assuming Wi-Fi passive scanning is performed every 5 minutes, this translates to a 3500 ms passive scanning time every 5 minutes, which corresponds to a duty cycle of 1.167%. Assuming 70 mA power consumption for the Wi-Fi receiver of the device, this corresponds to power consumption of over 0.8 mAh for each scan cycle.